Category: National

The recent suicide bombings and misfirings in London have Americans growing more anxious about security and debating pre-emptive measures. For New York City, which has a certain horrific event seared into its collective consciousness, this is not an academic exercise. As a result, it has instituted searches, albeit random, on its massive subway system.

It didn’t take long for the chattering class to get on the case. Where there are searches, there could also be profiling. Riding while Muslim, as it were. The media and civil libertarians have been re-asking a familiar – and seemingly rhetorical — question: Is profiling ever permissible outside actuarial charts?

Secretary of Transportation Norman “ACLU Mole” Mineta notwithstanding, the correct answer is “YES.” An excellent example would be the context conveniently provided by the war on terrorism. In fact, when we stop asking this question, we will have made progress. We would be stupid as a society at war to discard any would-be weapon, even a marginal one — and that’s what profiling is when it comes to non-airline transportation.

But it’s less than marginal when it’s RANDOM. It’s an ineffective, counterproductive misallocation of inadequate, transit-security resources. As if these terrorist atrocities were perpetrated at random. Here a grandmother from DesMoines, there a politician on a presidential ticket. You just never know.

Well, absent a radical change in martyrdom volunteers and who gets their ticket punched for Paradise via mass murder, we do know. They are 20-and-30-something Middle Eastern or East African males with backpacks. (And if the M.O. changes, it will probably be the Chechnyan model: young, Muslim suicide bomberettes.) Can’t we acknowledge such an ipso facto reality and then, without turning into racial, ethnic and religious vigilantes, make use of that?

Growing up in Philadelphia, I’m familiar with subways and the logistical nightmare presented by any kind of search policy. But if I’m a passenger – a human being not a debating point or a legal nuance – I want some odds, even long ones, in my favor. This is the worst of times for politically correct tunnel vision.

If this wholly imperfect approach, with potential scenarios for insensitivity, alienates those in the Muslim and civil liberties communities, so be it. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty alienated myself that I would have to furtively glance around and calculate who’s likely commuting to work and who seems destined for a bonus round of virgins.

After London, no American can rationally expect the U.S. to keep dodging the soft-target, suicide-bomber bullet. Nor can we assume there aren’t terrorist cells already in this country. Nor should be assume that they may be comprised mostly of guys from, say, Sweden or Lichtenstein.

Having said all that, the best form of security for mass transit is still intelligence gathering. Without that, we’re pretty much relegated to a Maginot Line with surveillance cameras.

This calls for a major ratcheting up of Muslim cooperation and insider- information help about awakening “sleeper” cells. If it means taking one for the home team (THIS country), as a trade-off for perceived betrayal within the Muslim community, then so be it again. Mutating cells need a network for support, safe harbor and “handler” scouts, sometimes referred to as MEWC’s (Middle Easterners With Cameras).

The best reaction for America’s loyal, law-abiding Muslims, which is virtually all Muslims in America, is to loudly denounce Islamaniacs in drumbeat fashion and rat out any terrorists in their – OUR – midst. That sort of mass murder-and-mayhem-preventing intelligence is the best defense against London-like attacks that are likely being planned even as we search — randomly or not.

It’s also the best response to any affronts associated with profiling.

The immediate aftermath of the London terrorist bombings resulted in two rather predictable upshots.

The Brits made good on their reputation for indomitable spirit. That was a given. Muslims of real influence and impact weren’t heard from. That was a shame.

To be sure, there were Muslim expressions of outrage, both in Britain and around the globe, including here, but these tended to be from the glib, chamber-of-commerce types or via letters to the editor. From those who don’t speak for the impressionable, volatile Arab street.

What were needed were clerics with clout, megaphone – metaphorical or otherwise — in hand, demanding time on Al-Jazeera and CNN.

And then using it to denounce in the strongest possible language all Islamaniacs who can justify any atrocity against any “infidel” of their defining — and targeting. And condemn in the harshest tones those who obscenely regard innocent bystanders as so much strategic leverage. And zealously exhort Muslim communities to rat out their apostate, homicidal vermin in the name of Allah and Muhammad. And delegitimize the perverted, jihadi death-wish mindset that festers on.

And finally – and defiantly — issue a fatwa damning Osama bin Laden. If necessary, redirect the one previously aimed at Salman Rushdie.

And after saying all that to the world — i.e., the West – then saying it again where it really matters. In the mosque. From the Middle East to “Eurabia” to North America. Or is it asking too much for religious and moral leaders to deplore mass murder and unconscionable barbarity?

No one would question that there’s no place on the planet in more need of humanitarian help than Africa, notably the sub-Sahara part of the continent where nearly 5 million children die annually before age 5. Thus the motivation for the recent Live 8 concerts staged worldwide.

But the agenda of the Make Poverty History organizers was necessarily political: to pressure the major industrial nations (G-8) into doing more for impoverished Africa. As in Third World debt relief and a quantum leap in aid.

That was understandable, because the G-8s represent world wherewithal. But the G-8s also symbolize an approach that has had more than its share of discrediting. It’s the macro version of something Americans are all too familiar with: throwing money at a problem.

It can only make a difference where there’s accountability. Where corruption doesn’t reign. Tragically, Africa is the hell hole for such criteria. It needs tough love – not a subsidy.

So, here’s a suggestion for Bob Geldoff, Bono, Sting and Co. Before putting the arm on the G-8s and guilt-tripping the West on what Africa is owed by relatively prosperous countries, try putting the squeeze on Africa to do more for Africa. To do more for its 300 million sub-Saharans who survive on less than $1 a day, to do more for its 37 million children under 5 who are underweight. Call it Live Tyrant. Or Boogie Against Bureaucracy. Or Caterwaul Against Corruption.

If anything is to be accomplished other than salved consciences, it will have to occur in a context where unelected despots and endemic corruption no longer prevail. If it’s appropriate to forgive billions in debt and to pledge $50 billion in annual aid by 2010 (from $25 billion), is it not proper to demand that pains be taken to ensure that such help go to those who are actually starving — and not to politically corrupt fat cats dining at the public trough?

While lacking the cachet of G-8 hectoring, Live Tyrant is an event – and a movement — whose time is long overdue. Certainly better than Madonna calling on the assemblage to “start a revolution.”

Thanks. Just what Africa needs.

Karl Rove unequivocally deserves his reputation as king maker/political Svengali.

It’s been evident since he helped George W. Bush upset Ann Richards for governor of Texas. We’ve seen it through two Bush presidential elections. He’s the acknowledged architect of Red State America.

We’ve even seen him cherry pick Mel Martinez, the Cuban Pedro Pan-turned- White House-harlot, to take back Bob Graham’s senate seat for the GOP.

He is the Republican most responsible for harnessing the pulpit populism of the evangelical and cultural right into pragmatic, political power: from pro-life to anti-Saddam.

He panders with a Midas touch.

Until now. From politically astute to politically stupid in a sound bite.

That’s the upshot of Rove’s flippant – but surely calculated – recent comments lambasting liberals for what, he asserted, was a less-than-robust reaction to 9/11.

Conservatives, said Rove, “saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”

Granted, this red-meat rhetoric wasn’t tossed to a Quaker peace rally – but the New York state Conservative Party in a venue not far from Ground Zero. And, yes, liberals might just revel in being the antithesis of a take-no-prisoners approach to defending the homeland. And, yes, it does follow earlier flaps caused by the truculent remarks of Democratic Chairman Howard Dean, who railed at Republicans’ ostensible distaste for an “honest day’s work,” and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin’s repellent comparison of the Guantanamo prison to Nazi camps and Soviet gulags.

But Rove is supposed to know better. It’s what he does. It’s all he does.

Always on his agenda: sucking up to and energizing the converted – without a tradeoff. You can’t lose what you’ve already written off. But there are conservative Democrats and independents – politically endangered species, to be sure – who can still determine close elections. It’s not smart to alienate those still listening in an increasingly polarized polity.

If there’s a place for such acerbic sass, it’s a political primary where only true believers really matter. Where you can get away with characterizing non-conservatives as part of a MoveOn.orgy. But the days of presidential primaries are as much in Rove’s past as in Bush’s.

When Rove speaks, which is usually through others, he speaks for the White House and a president who once said he wanted to be a “uniter,” not a “divider.”

The need has never been more acute for this country to be united. War will do that. But, arguably, the chasm of divisiveness only broadens. And this Rovean cheap shot only widens it farther.

Rove also did a disservice to the war effort, per se, with his comment that “Liberals saw what happened to us, and said, ‘We must understand our enemies.'”

Counterproductive political bombast is not the same as a dangerously misleading spin on the war against terrorism. It’s disingenuously simplistic to say “they hate us because they hate freedom” and our way of life. That’s now a Bush Administration mantra.

They disrespect our democratic ideals and castigate our celebrity culture – but not enough to warrant atrocities. What they truly hate – as only Islamaniacs can hate – is our foreign policy – from Israel as de facto 51st state to corrupt, autocratic sheikdoms in bed with the U.S. We are not obligated, of course, to sign off on Osama bin Laden’s grievance list, but we ignore the real terrorist underpinnings and motivations at our own peril.

The Deans and Durbins help neither their country – nor their party – with their ill-considered, ill-tempered barbs.

Ditto for Rove, who should know the difference between being a George Bush surrogate and emulating Steve Spurrier slumming with the boosters.

So much for the Midas touch. However, a Midas muffler might be appropriate.

Last week was another slap in the face for all those still frustrated by this country’s failed, counter-productive and cruel economic embargo against Cuba. For all those who remain appalled that hard-line exile elements in South Florida still hold foreign-policy veto chips. The recent affront was occasioned by the White House welcome accorded Phan Van Khai, the prime minister of Vietnam.

Lest we ever forget, the Vietnam where 58,000 American GI’s died and thousands more were maimed. The Vietnam, which has a tainted human rights record and no free press, censors internet access and mocks religious freedom. The Vietnam that we’ve had formal diplomatic relations with for the last decade. The Vietnam that former President Bill Clinton visited in 2000.

And it’s the Vietnam that is buying four Boeing 787 airliners, valued at $500 million apiece, did more than $6.4 million in two-way trade with the U.S. last year and wants U.S. help in fighting HIV/AIDS and joining the World Trade Organization. Khai’s itinerary also included Boeing-based Seattle and the Redmond (WA) campus of Microsoft, which has an office in Vietnam.

Not only did President George W. Bush reiterate America’s position supporting Vietnam’s WTO application, but he accepted Khai’s invitation to visit Hanoi.

Vietnam, lest we forget, was once a key domino in America’s Cold War “containment” policy against Communism. That policy’s application in Southeast Asia brought down a president and proved tragically flawed.

Vietnam is a sovereign country and part of the global marketplace. We don’t have to like everything about it to do business with it. We fought an unnecessary war with it and shed a lot of blood over it.

We haven’t forgotten our fallen, but we’ve moved on. And we’ve learned. The Cold War is no more.

Except, of course, for that island atavism just south of Key West, where the learning curve long ago turned into a continuous loop.

Now comes another study, this one from Harvard University, to remind us that the racial gap in graduation rates remains stubbornly, unacceptably large. “Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis in the South” reports that in Florida 45 percent of black students graduated in four years; 52 percent of Latinos; 54 percent of Native Americans; 63 percent of whites; and 80 percent of Asians.

The study’s recommendations include the usual references to better tracking and more support for dropout prevention programs.

Here’s a suggestion. Use the Asian model. It works even when students don’t speak English natively. It’s called family, work ethic and expectations of success. And government can’t parcel out any of it.

Lay persons – especially partisans – regularly interchange “not guilty” and “innocent.” One is a legal term, the other a moral judgment. If ever there was a time when such a misappropriation was inappropriate, it would be the lurid Michael Jackson case.

He was adjudged “not guilty” and walked. But, please, he hasn’t been innocent since the ’70s.

A prominent piece in last week’s Time magazine, entitled “Fast Times In Tehran,” jogged another memory from a trip to Iran just prior to Sept. 11, 2001.

The Time piece tells of how the autocratic mullahs have managed to buy off – using rising oil revenues – a younger generation increasingly more sybaritic than smoldering. Through more subsidies on more commodities, some relaxed social mores and generous loan policies, the government has – for now, at least – largely co-opted organized political dissent.

The expected election of pragmatic establishment fixture – read: cunning centrist – Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as president underscores the political torpor. There will be no groundswells of affection for the departing and disappointing Mohammed Khatami, the would-be reformer and lame-duck bust, after two ineffectual terms.

And yet there is the sense that the despotic regime, in buying off a generation may have bought less time than it supposes.

I harken back to a conversation in a shop in an Isfahan bazaar. It still resonates.

It’s a perspective on the U.S. – as well as Iranian youth – from Akbar Heshani, a well-traveled, educated, English-fluent carpet merchant. Heshani’s worldview is of someone who has lived in the West and visited world capitals worth visiting.

“First of all, I think America is a great country, and I love Americans. I think a lot of Iranians would say the same thing.

“But there’s also a lot – at least to me – that doesn’t make good sense. You have more freedoms than we do, and I won’t kid you, a lot of average Iranians would like more access to the internet, better television and videos, wine to drink at a restaurant, and so forth.

“But we don’t think, quite honestly, that Americans handle their freedoms with responsibility. Your ‘free press,’ is also free to pander to the worst in human nature. In fact, they helped make the (1979-80) hostage situation, which was shameful and regrettable, much worse by playing to the crowd, which was the same 500 students night after night at the (U.S.) embassy. Your entertainment media gets violent and pornographic, and it’s reflected in kids getting murdered in your schools. With a ban on alcohol, we don’t have Iranians killing each other on the highways.

“I know this seems so repressive to Americans, but we don’t want your excesses.

“But as for our young people, who weren’t around for the Revolution, I think they would like some excess. I guess all young people do.”

Precisely.

For all its nuclear nationalism and post-shah “Great Satan” rhetoric, Iran isn’t the tribal, jihadi-crazed mess that is Iraq. Nor is it the xenophobic basket case with nukes that is North Korea. And it’s not pseudo-ally Saudi Arabia, the infidel-hating epicenter of radical Islamic Wahhabism.

Frankly, there is legitimate hope that when the educated, consumption-enamored Axis of Envy generation finally comes of governing age, it will move to reduce theocratic excesses to symbolic trappings and assert itself as a mature global player – not a rogue religious state.

There is still a very viable future for Iranians – Persians – who don’t want to be a global filling station and don’t see the West as neo-Crusaders. Nor do they want to repeal the last dozen centuries.

Amid all the Islamic subplots – including those involving our corrupt, undemocratic, ostensible friends – the next generation in Iran may be our best bet to avoid a zero-sum religious war. These are people we ultimately should be able to work with. There is reason for optimism. They like our excesses.

In 2000 Al Gore proved, among other fateful decisions, what a mistaken, polarizing ploy it was to play the class-warfare card. Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean’s inimitable, populist punch lines now recall that counterproductive strategy. GOPsters were surely waxing more deja vu that affronted when they heard Dean quip recently that a lot of Republicans “have never made an honest living in their lives.” Trip-wire rhetoric is always dicey, but an “insult the undecideds” approach is a status quo plan to remain out of power.

Last year Tampa hosted the National Summit on Cuba. Previously it had been held in Washington and Miami. This weekend – June 10-11 – the Summit will be in Mobile, Ala.

Mobile has cultural and economic ties to Cuba and in 1993 became the first U.S. city to establish formal relations with Cuba through formation of Societe Mobile La Habana, a sister cities organization.